AI Software Engineer, Perplexity AI
AI Software Engineer, Agents
$220-405k
Offers Equity
Conversational AI-powered search tool
Job no longer available
Conversational AI-powered search tool
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
$220-405k
Offers Equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To advance the way people discover and share information.
Role
Who you are
- Strong foundational familiarity with the full AI product stack
- Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust)
- Significant experience in at least one of the following areas:
- Context engineering and tool interfaces for frontier AI models
- Post-training and reinforcement learning (particularly for multimodal models)
- Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.)
- Strong product intuition and taste for user experience excellence
- Comfortable working with a small, fast-moving team, must be willing to dive in and take ownership
- A passion for shipping products that surprise and delight
What the job involves
- Perplexity is seeking an energetic engineer to join our highly driven Agents engineering team
- The Agents team consists of AI/ML, backend, and full-stack engineers who collaborate to build delightful agentic experiences within our Comet ecosystem and Perplexity Computer, our platform for generalized frontier intelligence
- Our vision is to empower our users with AI agents that can faithfully actualize their intent, however and wherever expressed, through open-ended interactions with the world
- As an engineer on our Agents team, you will bring AI expertise, sharp product intuition, and a tinkerer's mindset to advance the frontier of what agents can accomplish for our millions of devoted users
- Designing AI agents to navigate the digital world and perform increasingly valuable units of work for our users
- Training action and decision models that determine, based on complex multimodal states, how to accomplish user-specified objectives
- Providing consistently excellent experiences across desktop, mobile, headless cloud, and other environments through flexible abstractions and frictionless backgrounding
- Developing permission architectures, payload classifiers, and other methods to implement secure-by-design agentic capabilities
- Designing optimal data representations and modes of interaction between agents and their environments
- Drive cutting-edge AI capabilities across multiple layers of a rapidly growing product in the AI agents space
- Develop and leverage cutting-edge AI models, infrastructure, and browser technologies to advance the capability frontier and scale those capabilities for a rapidly growing userbase
- Ensure a high craft and quality bar, in both AI agent performance and user experience
- Collaborate with fellow engineers, designers, product managers, data scientists, and others across the company to integrate core Perplexity functionality into our frontier agentic products and vice-versa
- Contribute to product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance across the broader team
Our take
As AI continues to drive changes in both business operations and day-to-day lives, Perplexity AI delivers an intelligent search engine powered by conversational AI, to improve search outcomes and "unlock the power of knowledge" for all.
Reaching impressive heights of 22M monthly visits, Perplexity's "ask anything" method of search is clearly a popular one. And what sets it apart from other search engines is in its answers, which are concise and fully cited, responding to the user query rather than simply providing a place in which they can scroll to find it themselves.
The company has raised substantial funding, with contributions from former execs at companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Quora, demonstrating the interest that it has drummed up in the space. Having doubled its annual recurring revenue between 2023 and 24, this investment will allow Perplexity AI to continue building out its product, and accelerate growth into the future.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
Sep 2025
$200m
LATE VC
Jul 2025
$100m
LATE VC
Total funding: $1.8bn
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Aravind Srinivas
(Co-Founder, President & CEO)Former Research Scientist at OpenAI, who has interned in Research at Google and Deep Mind. Obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Denis Yarats
(Co-Founder & CTO)Prior to co-founding Perplexity in 2022, Denis was an AI Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research, a Staff ML Engineer at Quora, and a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft.
Johnny Ho
(Co-Founder & CSO)Previously a Quantitative Trader at Tower Research Capital, and Engineer at Quora.
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